Explaining 'explanations'

Theories and academic work are often wildly misunderstood. Lay people tend to
perceive them as disconnected and unreal imaginings of people in ivory towers.
In fact nothing could be further from the truth. If you publish an academic
paper, it gets fiercely scrutinized by all of your peers for any glimmer of
assumptions made that are not backed up with copious research.

This section is called 'explanations' because that is what theories are.
Academics do not dream up theories and then try to prove them. The way it works
is that first a phenomenon is observed and then a theory is developed as an
explanation for it. The theory is then tested ad infinitum from every angle and
context.

For example, when Newton identified his laws of motion to explain how bodies
move, it was successfully tested on everything from apples to planets. However,
it failed to explain the movement of subatomic particles, which led to quantum
mechanics as a system for describing the baffling properties of these tiny
particles.